The business of marketing involves building relationships. No matter how large your CRM, or customer database, the activities of reaching, engaging, and driving audiences to action now involve creating one-to-one relationships at scale.

Whether you work in B2B or B2C, your customer or prospect is a real person with an ever-broadening digital footprint. They have a personal and a professional persona, often disparate in nature, and cannot be effectively profiled or understood by data captured from any single channel.

To truly understand the whole person behind the data, from all dimensions and across channels, you need to embrace the future of creating complete customer profiles using identity resolution.

The What and Why of Identity Resolution

Identity resolution is the science of taking a single piece of contact data about your customer or prospect – an email address, social handle or telephone number – and connecting it to signals from that same person across other channels and devices.

It enables you to understand someone’s psychographic and demographic profile, as well as their brand affinities and interests, based on their social media activity.

The resulting ‘whole person’ view of an individual provides the ability to engage them seamlessly in an omnichannel manner. Moreover, the quality and authenticity of the relationship you have with them increases exponentially.

Three key benefits of identity resolution:

Identify and connect with your customer across channels

Create a complete picture of a customer starting with a single piece of data

Using Identity Resolution for Audience Insights, Development and Expansion

Businesses can take advantage of identity resolution for more than individual engagement. Companies are building distinct competitive advantage by using it to derive insights and development opportunities at an aggregated audience level.

Taking the principles of identity resolution and aggregating the data provided by individual profiles, companies are discovering previously unrecognized audience segments that engage with their brands. They can build new data-driven personas, design more targeted campaigns, and reach the right people in the right channels at the right times with the right messages. They can also build look-alike audiences to expand their reach.

Return on Identity

The shift in marketing effectiveness that happened with the dawn of digital marketing was unprecedented. Mass media became a vehicle for branding and awareness campaigns, while digital marketing allowed for a new level of targeting, measurement, and optimization.

Identity resolution is poised to have the same impact. By identifying, understanding and engaging individuals and audiences across channels and devices, companies can build deeper, more authentic, and more valuable relationships than ever before.